With The Institute, Stephen King Channels Political Outrage into Familiar Horror

It’s in the moral murk of a politically loaded situation that King finds the richest seam of his story.

The InstituteFor years after the publication of The Shining, fans wondered what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy with the psychic powers at the center of the 1977 novel. While promoting Full Dark, No Stars in 2010, Stephen King acknowledged in an interview that he liked the idea of a world where Danny and Charlene “Charlie” McGee, the pyrokinetic main character of 1980’s Firestarter, could get married. According to the author, “they would have totally wonderful children.” Though Doctor Sleep would later conclude Danny’s story, and close down the possibility of that particular union forever, King’s latest novel suggests that the idea continues to flower in his imagination.

The Institute is chock-full of “wonderful” children or, at least, some very ordinary children with extraordinary powers. At its center is the Institute, a facility in the woods of Main that houses kids who’ve been abducted because of their telekinetic and telepathic abilities. There, the children are tested and tortured in order to enhance their wild talents. And into this hellish dominion enters Luke Ellis, a boy with middling telekinetic reach but dizzying intellect.

Meanwhile, ex-cop Tim Jamieson settles into his new home in the South Carolina town of DuPray, a place as Kingsian to its core as the man himself. Good-natured and kind, unflinchingly but undemonstratively moral, and with a newfound willingness to follow his hunches, Jamieson is the sort of hero that King has been writing about since 1979’s The Dead Zone. Our introduction to DuPray and Jamieson, who takes a job as a “night knocker” for the local sheriff, is warm and meandering, but its brevity is a tell: that King won’t be writing in his more sweeping epic style. The baroque backstories and irrelevant divergences that mark the highs—or lows, depending on your perspective—of King’s fiction are here offered in miniature. It’s a hurried sketch rather than a meticulous painting of a small community.

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For better and worse, after this brief introduction, the novel jumps the 1,000 miles north to the Institute, remaining there for the better part of 300 pages, abandoning Jamieson and DuPray for so long that readers may forget that they ever existed. When Jamieson suddenly reappears, the jarring effect is both a testament to the absorbing power of Luke’s narrative and a sign of how weakly King has woven together the two strands of The Institute.

Though the “special” child is a well that King has drawn from many a time, the novel has a political edge that rescues the trope from the shadow of redundancy. The Institute is about separating children from their parents and putting them in cages, all in the name of national security and the better good. Even though King has stated that he wasn’t inspired by ICE and the migrant crisis, it’s almost impossible to separate the fiction from the headlines. And it’s in the moral murk of this situation that he finds the richest seam of his story. The Institute, you see, has a practical purpose. And while that purpose is best left for readers to discover for themselves, it will spoil nothing to say that the novel offers a philosophical quandary: How many children are you willing to destroy to save the world?

Such a question allows King to move away from the Manichaean notion of good and evil that limits much horror fiction. The Institute’s staff ranges from jobbing professionals to zealots for the cause. Sprinkled in are a few obligatory sadists, but these are the least interesting of the children’s tormentors. Queen above all is Mrs. Sigsby, who combines the primness of Dolores Umbridge with Nurse Ratched’s terrifying psychopathy. She’s the villainous heart of the novel, yet her cruelty is neither unthinking nor indulgent. She’s merely the result of an unblinking ideology that allows her to see children as resources rather than human beings.

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King has always been particularly good at etching the bureaucratic villain. His writing is sophisticated enough to acknowledge that few humans pursue evil for its own sake. Mrs. Sigsby is the very opposite of an agent of chaos. But her pursuit of order involves a complacent evil that’s more terrifying because of its authenticity. Like everyone else, she has a boss, and quotas to meet, and little time to consider the moral implications of her actions. And her eventual undoing ranks among the more satisfying of King’s resolutions because Mrs. Sigsby represents the walls of bureaucratic unkindness that plague 21st-century life.

The children are charming, of course. No one writes kids for adults as well as King. The Institute has been marketed as It for the new generation. This seems mostly to be a publishing gambit to grasp the coattails of Andy Muschietti’s successful two-part adaptation of It. But there’s some truth in the comparison—namely, in the realistic camaraderie fostered between the kids, who face and overcome the apathetic cruelty that adults represent.

All of which makes it a shame that the book is so rote, as it sees King continuing to dip his toes in the same murky, shallow waters of crime fiction where much of his work has been stuck for the last decade. The author remains in the top tier of storytellers. Much has been made of this, often in reductive tones—as if storytelling isn’t what we’re all here for. Such benign dismissal neglects his deceptively simple style, the crafted tone of voice that seamlessly marries the everyman and the extraordinary. It overlooks the heart and heat that radiates off the page of a King novel, and in The institute his skills actually come to the fore more than usual because the story itself is fairly insubstantial.

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The ideas are there: the juxtaposition of a human America against a corporate one, the meeting of physical and psychogeographic landscapes, that even in a multifaceted situation there’s a clear definable line of goodness. But King has wielded them more elaborately and successfully elsewhere. In The Institute, he offers them as the axes of a yarn that’s wholly relevant, and which nods toward the underlying complexity of any project based on serving “the greatest good,” but which, even at close to 600 pages, feels too fleeting to offer answers.

Stephen King’s The Institute is now available from Scribner in the U.S. and Hodder in the U.K.

Neil McRobert

Neil McRobert completed a PhD in Gothic Literature and promptly fled academia. He now lives in a small British village, where he writes stories and has opinions on those written by others.

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